A fertiliser company drilling for gas, a sawmiller building wind farms: these two extreme examples show just how worried businesses are about the state of New Zealand’s energy supply.They have been fortunate to a certain extent because of the past rainy, damp year - so was the average consumer who was spared another winter of appeals to save electricity. And with the pressure off, the underfloor heating went up a notch or three and heated towel rails were back in action.

But in the world of business there is alarm about the steady climb of electricity prices.

This concern has led to several large businesses investigating new ways to generate their own power and conserve energy and so reduce their reliance on the national grid and those ever-rising and increasingly volatile energy prices.

The Government’s response has been to try to encourage business energy efficiency through the EECA - the Energy Efficiency Conservation Authority.

Not that that has been especially successful: Energy Minister Pete Hodgson released research last month showing that energy efficiency had improved by a whole 1 per cent during the two years to March 2003.

Authority chief executive Heather Staley said there were special challenges in getting businesses to look at their energy bills, particularly when economic times were good.

"One of the things about a booming economy is that people are more interested in sales."

That was only natural, but in the present climate many business leaders were starting to report capacity constraints on plant, equipment and staff. "This is the perfect opportunity - if they’re starting to think about investing in the business to pursue that magic formula of increasing sales and reducing costs at the same time - to look at an investment that is going to increase their capacity and is also going to be cheaper to run," she said.

That also meant that when the economy "started to tighten up", the companies’ lower cost structure would make it easier for them to survive.

Staley said the authority had found that companies that ran energy audits were better equipped to analyse their business.

An example was the National Bank, which found it was paying power bills in buildings it no longer inhabited.

Such holes in management systems could often be found when energy outputs were studied in detail.

Staley said she was sometimes tempted to offer money-back guarantees that an EECA energy audit would find 10 per cent cost reductions that would be cost-effective within a 12-month to 18-month payback period.

"If it was anything sexier than energy efficiency, I wouldn’t have any difficulty in pitching this."